Tag: Marketing Content
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Mastering Demand Generation: Aligning Content To The Buyer’s Journey For Retaining Buyers
In today’s competitive business landscape, not all marketing content is created equal. A one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work anymore. To truly engage buyers and nurture them towards conversion, marketers need to align their content with the buyer’s journey. This means understanding the different stages of the buying process and developing content strategies that meet…
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Niche Down To A Market Of One
In today’s fast-paced world, businesses are having to adjust to a transformed customer base, with clientele possessing instant access to more information than ever. This shift can benefit both parties, ideally helping to minimize frustration or delay. An informed customer experiencing clear cut and transparent communication is always the end goal. But who is that…
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Unlocking Business Growth: The Importance Of A Solid Customer Acquisition Strategy
In a previous post entitled “Calculating Your Customer Acquisition Cost: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding Your CAC”, I discussed how to go calculate a customer acquisition cost (CAC). In this blog post, I want to delve further into why having a customer acquisition strategy is critical to scaling a business. A customer acquisition strategy is…
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Creating A Customer-Centric Experience: Understanding & Meeting Customer Expectations For Business Success
In the past I have written about the importance of a human resource (HR) philosophy that focuses on communication and expectation. This type of HR philosophy is centered around the relationship between the employer and keeping a satisfied employee. This same type of relationship philosophy is important to have for a business and it’s customers.…
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Put eMail Into Your Marketing Strategy
There’s an old saying in online marketing: “The best time to start an email list was two years ago; the second best time to start is now.” Email, SEO and blogs continuously outperform their social media counterparts. According to several studies, about 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning…64% of small businesses…
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The Search For A Product – Market Fit
Entrepreneurs basically have two options to get an answer on the viability of their product/service before attempting to carve out a new market for it. The true test of viability isn’t whether or not the product offering works for the intended purpose. It’s also not whether or not you can sell it to a customer.…
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Market Strategy Implementation Requires Supporting Tactics
Over the past years, the economy has taken a major digital shift that has impacted the way businesses connect and interact online with their customers. All company communication, sales demos, & business meetings have turned mostly virtual with remote and hybrid work environments. This digital shift has also shaped the consumer expectations of all businesses.…
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Write Content Using Buyer Journey Funnels
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and to influence profitable customer action.
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How To Build Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty has become a necessity for the growth and longevity of a business. However, many businesses today have adopted a transactional rather than a relational experience for their customers. Companies seem to have forgotten that without customers, there is no business. Over the years, I have learned from professional experience what it takes to…
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Think Hourglass – The Buyer’s Life Cycle
In the past, I have blogged about the importance of understanding the buyer’s journey and how it relates to the marketing/sales funnel. Have you ever thought about how to change that funnel into an hour glass shape by focusing on retaining customers? First, let me quickly review of the buyer’s journey — sales funnel concept:…
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Build Your Brand Recognition
For a small business, it can be very important to have a brand name everyone recognizes. People identify businesses in terms of the brand that the business has been able to create. You better define how your business is unique or more valuable than the competition because if you don’t do this well, your customers…
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Keep Personal & Business Finances Separate
It can be difficult to keep your personal and business finances separate when you own a small business. It is especially challenging to keep your accounts divided if your business is structured as a sole proprietorship. Since sole proprietorship is considered a nonentity, there is no legal separation between you and the business. When you…
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Thought Leadership Vs Content Marketing Tactics
Thought leadership is getting a lot of attention among those aiming their marketing to increase brand recognition. So does content marketing, which is often touted for its ability to create top-of-funnel and marketing-qualified leads. So what are the differences in these two marketing strategies? Here are some thoughts to contemplate. Content marketing is top-down; thought leadership is…
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Content Marketing Mistakes
Currently content marketing is one of the smartest investments a small business can make, especially if you are in the early startup stages. Content marketing is a way to provide your potential customers with informative content to questions they seek. According to a 2020 Hubspot survey around 40% of marketers say that content marketing is…
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Why Direct-To-Customer Succeeds or Fails
The term Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) refers to companies that make products and sell them to consumers, usually online but some in their own branded stores, avoiding traditional multi-brand retailers like department stores. One example is Warby Parker (I just bought glasses from them) but there are many others. The concept is simple: sell the product to…
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Build Your Brand Message
Every brand has a unique selling proposition — the one thing they do better than everyone else. Unfortunately, founders often make the mistake of trying to focus on the same unique selling proposition as their biggest competitor, or they try to market themselves as being “the best” in almost every facet of their business. Naturally,…
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Digital Front Doors Are Here To Stay
The customer journey is being transformed using digital tools and creative customer engagement strategies. Customers can: try on glasses at home and order them online; take classes and learn new skills from industry experts; order groceries, make appointments, and get medical care all from our cellphones and laptops. As I pointed out in my January…
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Grow Your Sales Pipeline
How do I get more leads? This is a common question posed by many consultants, entrepreneurs and organizations. Depending on your industry, the question may be even harder to answer these days. Creating engagement content that creates a lead magnet (free content given away in exchange for your audience’s contact information) is one of the…
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Effective Elevator Pitch Basics
How to Effectively Describe Your Product in One Sentence Start crafting an elevator pitch by asking yourself a set of critical questions. Whether you’re an artist, service provider, or entrepreneur, you likely want to get your product/service in front of as many people as possible. You know that you need to market the product/service to…
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Inconvenient Truths About Content
Content marketing is, without a doubt, the most over-hyped and least-understood marketing tool for entrepreneurs and small businesses owners. And it’s certainly not the panacea it’s been made out to be. The interactive web (social media, blogs, videos, etc.) has made content marketing relatively easy and inexpensive. And therein lies the rub. As with entrepreneurship,…
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Common Sense Sales Strategy
As companies focus on content creation and delivery, the marketplace is being flooded with high-quality information. In fact, most of the companies I mentor have reported they are lost in a maze of options, choices and noise. The problem buyers (especially B2B) see is that there is too much high quality content information and that…
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Digital Ad ROI Measurement
The effectiveness of digital ads is wildly oversold. A large-scale study of ads on eBay found that brand search ad effectiveness was overestimated by up to 4,100%. A similar analysis of Facebook ads threw up a number of 4,000%. For all the data we have, it seems like companies still don’t have an answer to…
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Online Marketing or Spamming?
Online Practices Marketers Need to Leave in 2020 Doing these five things doesn’t make you a good marketer, it just makes you a spammer. Some things are better left behind in 2020, and that includes certain social media practices. Lately, there is a lot of talk about the dangers of social media and the addictive…
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Key To Writing A Marketing Message
The key to market messaging is to write in reverse. Writing in reverse is simple: You have to reverse the roles of the writer (you) with the recipient (your audience). Think in terms of the outcome wanted by the reader. For instance, never tell the reader how to feel. Instead use evocative, concrete words that…
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Content & The Sales Funnel
Some content is designed to engage those at the top of the buying funnel, some to continue the conversation with the buyer & nurture leads in the middle buying stages & some is for sales to convert prospective clients into buyers. This is applying content specific marketing to the old “Sales Funnel — Hook; Story;…
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Demand Generation
Get more referrals Did you know B2B prospects are four times more likely to close when referred by someone they trust in their industry? The key to getting more referrals is to build trust with your existing clients. Since the year 2020, we can’t afford to leave these relationships untapped. Asking your clients for referrals…
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Testing Your Marketing Strategy
In business, what gets measured gets managed…that’s especially true for marketing. It’s important to test your marketing strategy — you won’t know if you’re on the right track until you take the time to analyze the results of your efforts. Your marketing is the link between your product & your customers, so don’t treat it as an…
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Become An Affiliate Marketer
An affiliate marketer promotes offers or products that relate to them and/or their interests. They often appear very organic, and most likely, you won’t notice that it is a promotion at all. Whether you are aware or not, you’ve seen affiliate links everywhere, from social media influencer’s subtle or not so subtle product promotions to…
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Buyer Journey Map Format
In a previous thought post, I discussed, in detail, the benefits of buyer journey mapping. Since that time, I have been requested to post the spreadsheet format used in my past companies and workshops for building a buyer journey map. Several of you also requested the 5-Ws for building a successful buyer journey map. The…
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Bootstrapping Public Relations
Do-It-Yourself PR campaigns are difficult when bootstrapped, but still doable with the right strategies. The startup life is nothing short of an adventure that is made of a series of mini-quests along the way. Those quests become increasingly difficult to complete when operating in bootstrapped mode, which forces entrepreneurs to do more with less. The…
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Applying Technology To Sales
Understanding the role technology can play in recovery and growth this year, sales leadership needs to consider taking a more holistic digital first approach. As more people adopt a digital mindset and use technology for almost everything, sales teams have to engage with customers in a relevant digital way. Making this shift lets sales leaders and…
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Think Inside Out To Avoid Branding Mistakes
It doesn’t matter how well you use marketing to tell your story if you miss what makes that story real. I still remember pre-pandemic when I went into a small coffee shop that served gourmet coffee, tea , artisan sandwiches, and gelato. There was a case with fresh-baked pastries, and it smelled like, well, gourmet…
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Branding Mistakes
Being an entrepreneur and launching a brand isn’t easy. It takes a lot of skill, hard work and usually a little luck. When it comes to branding decisions, sometimes one bad mistake can derail even the best idea. To be sure, this doesn’t happen to you, make sure you avoid making any of these six…
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Building Digital Customer Trust
As a long-time business executive and mentor to entrepreneurs, I see a definitive shift away from customer trust in traditional business messages, and the executives who deliver them. People no longer trust scripted messages and marketing “speak”. Today’s digitally distracted consumer is led to trust only things that they see with their own eyes. They…
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Marketing – Buyer Journey Map
What is the buyer’s journey? The buyer’s journey describes the process your buyers go through as they become aware of a problem, evaluate potential solutions to their problem, and ultimately decide on the specific solution that’s right for them. In marketing terms, reduce this down to three stages: awareness, consideration and decision (some call this…
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Message Integration
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, is such a cliché that it has spawned its own cliché: If it ain’t broke, break it. Unfortunately, that’s just what many companies do unwittingly to their branding programs, playing into the hands of public enemy No. 1 in today’s marketing environment: fragmentation. More and more television networks,…
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Sales Funnel Content Checklist
A well-structured client acquisition process which runs across multiple communication platforms; Use metrics to guide the optimization of your funnel so you can hit your business KPIs (revenue and clients). The success of a digital advertising campaign depends on a variety of factors from targeting the right audience to converting them into customers. If you…
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Digital Sales Funnels
Digital Sales Funnel…A process comprised of a set of steps from the beginning of getting traffic to a landing page to the end till a part of that traffic makes a purchase…sales funnels differ across different business types…there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to funnels: B2B; Online Education; eCommerce; Subscription business. The key here is becoming…